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Athens, they did not then win more of his respect than they do now 

 that of the President of Princeton College ; and the New Testament 

 record appears to have left them in the following curt parenthesis : 

 "(For all the Athenians and strangers sojourning there spent their 

 time in nothing but either to tell or to hear some new thing.)" But 

 literary students are expected to find, and no doubt do find, much 

 compensation for any deficiencies in the " sweetness and light" af- 

 forded by the study of the logic and rhetoric of their greatest authors. 



If I am saying something too much about the Greeks, it is only to 

 help the sous of farmers and of mechanics to dismiss from their 

 minds a prevailing error that an education in institutions where Greek 

 is a non-essential will to them prove of unequal rank and value to 

 that of institutions where it is kept constantly at the front, and who, 

 lacking the required preparation for it, or the time required to pre- 

 pare for it, may be deterred from entrance to any college. Notwith- 

 standing the universal prevalence of our common schools, it is 

 doubtful, with all of our colleges, whether the number of college 

 graduates, in proportion to population, is much greater than it was 

 one hundred years ago. I would have higher learning more widely 

 disseminated. 



The great distinction of the ancient Greeks in the force and beau- 

 ty of their language, in oratory, history, poetry, sculpture, and ar- 

 chitecture must be conceded, as it has for ages been a perpetual mar- 

 vel ; but this apparently foremost race of men, within certain limita- 

 tions, and, in a dark age, unsurpassed in their special intellectual and 

 Olympian development, has been doomed to such an extreme deca- 

 dence that the world now attaches much less importance to the de- 

 scendants of Homer, Pericles and Demosthenes than to the descend- 

 ants of the ancient Germans whom Thucydides described as among 

 the lowest types of barbarians. Doubtless some reason for this de- 

 cadence may be found in the fact that the ancient Greeks, like our 

 American savages, held industrial employments as entitled to no hon- 

 or, and unworthy of the worshippers of the Grecian gods and god- 

 desses. Nowhere rejecting their good examples, let us beware of 

 following their "example of unbelief" in labor, or of unbelief in the 

 value of educated labor in promoting general morality and obedience 

 to law as well as in promoting the intelligence, power and beauty of the 

 national character. 



We live in a Christian age, and do not ignorantly worship an un- 

 known God. We accept it as a blessing that to Adam it was or- 



